The main hypotheses about how placebo works are expectancy, motivation, conditioning, and endogenous opiates. These sound like good things, and in fact they are used in conventional medicine all the time.

We can’t isolate placebo effect from conventional medicine — it gets us thinking the wrong way. As the neurologist Robert Burton says, “Even given our advanced state of medical knowledge, much of routine medical care — from treating backaches to the common cold — relies primarily upon reassurance and hope, not disease- specific treatments … we need to reconsider how to facilitate the placebo effect with minimal risk and cost, and without deception.”

Humans work in mysterious ways. One of the most important lessons of science, in mind mind, is that we are not in control of ourselves by far - lots and lots of things go on in our minds that "we" are not in control of, or even aware of. We are masters at deluding ourselves, and placebo treatments is a testament to that.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.